Only one more day until the official release of Mac OS X, though some people already have official (not bootlegged) copies. I don't know how I feel about it. Mac OS X is a major development and normally I would be quite eager to install it on my machine, regardless of the consequences. Perhaps software has become more complicated or I depend on my Macintosh more now than ever or maybe I'm just too tired to go through this again, because I'm ambivalent about the whole thing. Of course, I could wake up tomorrow and have the sudden fervor to but Mac OS X and install it at gaming -- which would be monumentally foolish considering how much I need this computer. Whims are funny that way, they don't care about the consequences.

Assuming I give in to temptation, how will that affect me? Mac OS X comes with three CDs: Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1, and Mac OS X Developer Tools. Including the development tools is a nice touch since, like any Unix installation, compiling your own binaries is rather important. Mac OS X only works with Mac OS 9.1, so I'd have to upgrade the Classic OS which imposes a double upgrade. Not only do I get incompatibilities due to Mac OS X, I get them due to Mac OS 9.1 also. I'm also afraid that I won't be able to dual boot into Mac OS 9. Indeed, my original setup is to have two partitions. One partition has the old OS and when upgrading I install a fresh system on the second partition (which usually is full of games that are wiped out, games being non-critical and most likely to break compared to other applications in any case).

I need the classic environment on my work machine. On the server machine I can probably get away with only using Mac OS X as there are only 3 applications that I really need: mail server, web server, domain name server. But for my work machine I need Virtual PC and VNC, neither of which have any plans for OS X versions as far as I can tell. DAVE also has no OS X version announced though I can probably replace it with Sharity. IPNetRouter is gone, but Mac OS X is supposed to support multiple network interfaces easily. ICQ, the Keyspan USB-Serial Adapter both have OS X versions. CodeWarrior will have an OS X version, as will Microsoft Office. iDo I can replace with cron and AppleScript should work fine.

Bottom line is that there are way too many applications to update if I want to ditch classic. Actually, it doesn't look as bad as I thought when I first started writing this. A few things will die, perhaps spectacularly. But I do think that Apple does a good job with its software. Many times I've read complaints with people updating Apple software and all their problems getting this or that to work. Mostly it boils down to "install from scratch, don't upgrade in place" and "check for updated drivers and programs before installing that old copy on your new system".

I'm thinking that it might be easier to first install Mac OS X on my server. Less requirements so less hassles and it'll give me some experience before upgrading my work computer. Issue is that I don't really want the server offline too long. Possible solution is to start my 6100 (since it still has all the software installed and most of the settings are close to up-to-date) and use it as a static server for the time being. Other solution is to just bite the bullet and take the server offline for a day. Last solution is to move everything to Thales for a few days. Naturally, option 3 is not something I want to do.

Looking at my list of the applications installed on my work machine and there aren't that many. There are OS X versions already for some of them, others I can use in classic or switch to a different product. Virtual PC I can replace with a real PC with Windows 95 and VNC to control it, if it doesn't work in classic which I suspect it wont. I can almost go totally OS X except for Palm Desktop (which I can replace but it'll be a bother moving all the data) and Quicken Deluxe (which there will be a version for OS X). Mostly it seems a "wait three months for software to catch up" thing but I don't think I'll be able to wait. And it's a great opportunity to clean up my hard drive.